Photo by Jerod MacDonald-Evoy/Illustration by Jim Small | Arizona Mirror
Just days ahead of a government shutdown, the Republicans who lead the Arizona House of Representatives and Senate and the Democratic governor finally came to agreement on a bipartisan budget.
On Thursday evening, the state House voted for a third time on a package of 15 budget bills, which mostly passed by bipartisan votes of 41-15. The Senate is expected to approve the final version of the budget, which was developed in the Senate, on Friday morning, and Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs is expected to sign it after that.
This resolution to the state’s struggle to pass a budget only happened after weeks of infighting, name calling and political posturing between Republicans in the House and the Senate.
Before the Thursday evening votes, House legislators from both sides of the aisle heaped ample criticism on the budget bills.
The nine Republicans who opposed the budget package, mostly members of the far-right Arizona Freedom Caucus, said they did so because the $17.6 billion deal increased spending too much and gave too many concessions to Hobbs.
Rep. Alexander Kolodin, a Scottsdale Republican and Freedom Caucus member, accused members of his party who voted for the budget of betraying their constituents.
“There is a lack of backbone in this supposedly Republican body,” he said. “We failed to stand up and push back on Katie Hobbs.”
Kolodin told Republican Speaker Steve Montenegro that he was ashamed of Montenegro for cutting him off when he reached his time limit to explain his vote. Montenegro did the same to every other legislator who passed the three-minute limit.
The seven Democrats who voted against some of the bills said they were appalled at the budget’s $24 million in funding to support border safety.
Hobbs has promised to use the allocations to the Gang & Immigration Intelligence Team Enforcement Mission for things like fentanyl interdiction, but Tucson Democrat Consuelo Hernandez said that wasn’t good enough, adding that she was ashamed of Democrats who voted for that part of the budget.
“We’re contributing money for people in my community to be terrorized,” she said, claiming that the language of the legislation clearly says the funds can be used to help the federal government deport immigrants who lack legal status.
Legislators from both parties who voted for the budget agreement said that it was far from perfect, but that it was a realistic compromise they could stomach with a divided state government. Many of them also pointed out that it would prevent an unprecedented state government shutdown that would happen in just four days if they did nothing.
The bipartisan budget funded priorities of both parties, including 5% pay raises for state troopers, tax cuts for small businesses, pay raises for state firefighters and one-time bonuses for correctional officers. It also included $100 million more in K-12 public school funding than an original budget plan from the House, as well as around $250 million more for Medicaid.
And it puts $119 million toward road projects, including $27 million to start widening on I-10 between Citrus Road and State Route 85, and $54 million to complete projects along State Route 347.
The plan fully funds the universal school voucher program, which Democrats oppose as a handout to wealthy parents, many of whom were already sending their children to private schools prior to receiving a voucher.
Additionally, the budget continues funding for the Division of Developmental Disabilities, part of the Department of Economic Security, which was at the center of a lengthy struggle for supplemental funding earlier this year, putting 60,000 people with disabilities at risk of losing vital services.
Both parties only came to an agreement on the budget after weeks of feuding between Republicans in the Senate and the House. Republicans in the Senate worked with Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs to create a bipartisan budget deal, while GOP leaders in the House left those negotiations and unilaterally created and passed their own $17.3 billion plan. That plan was stacked with a conservative wish-list and would have never made it past a Hobbs veto.
The Senate, fed up with political posturing from the House, voted last week to pass its negotiated budget and attempted to end the legislative session without consulting the House.
Instead of being forced into a vote on the Senate bill that some said was not conservative enough, the House earlier this week passed a continuation budget that would keep funding at the same levels as this year. House leaders said that would give them more time to negotiate a better budget.
In an unusual move, the next day the Senate voted to pass both the House’s continuation budget as well as its earlier full-fledged budget plan, knowing that Hobbs would veto both.
She immediately vetoed both House budget plans, essentially forcing the lower chamber to take up the Senate budget to avoid a state government shutdown.
The entire weekslong process that led to the final budget agreement was packed with political grandstanding and harsh criticism from everyone involved. Hobbs and Democrats called the original House budget a “sham,” and Senate President Warren Petersen criticized proponents of the original House plan for contributing to a toxic political environment and putting on a show for clout instead of working toward a bipartisan solution.
In turn, House Republicans, as well as a few Republican senators accused members of their own party in the Senate of cowing to Hobbs and ignoring the wishes of their own caucus.
The Senate’s chief budget negotiator, John Kavanagh, told them that he would love to support their proposals but they would kill the budget deal and result in a veto from Hobbs.
Freedom Caucus members in the House, led by Justin Olson, Joseph Chaplik and Kolodin, introduced numerous amendments to the Senate budget plan Thursday evening that were copied directly from the original House budget. These proposals had no chance of passing, and the legislators knew that, but still spoke about them at length, and repeatedly forced procedural votes that made a day that continued late into the evening even longer.
Sen. Jake Hoffman, the leader of the far-right Arizona Freedom Caucus did the same thing as the Senate worked through its budget amendments earlier this month, adding hours to a process that ended just before 2 a.m.
Kolodin spoke at length about a provision from the initial House budget that would have intervened in an ongoing feud between the Republican Maricopa County Board of Supervisors and Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap. Heap is a former state representative and Freedom Caucus member who has been battling the board of supervisors over election administration duties basically since he took office in January.
Heap recently escalated the fight when he sued the board of supervisors, with whom his office shares election responsibilities.
“The people of Maricopa County elected Recorder Justin Heap because they knew it was time for a change in the way our elections had been administered,” Kolodin said. “The voters believed that elections were not being securely managed, and that real change was needed at the top.”
The Maricopa County Recorder’s Office recently mailed letters to 83,000 of its registered voters, erroneously telling them that they would be removed from the active early voting list because they had obtained a license in a different state, Votebeat reported. Those voters were supposed to get a notification that they were involved in a state error requiring them to provide proof of citizenship to vote a full ballot.
A spokesman for the recorder’s office blamed the error on the business that printed the letters.
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